This post is to run through the installation of a basic M3 15.1.2 environment. As with my previous documentation of the 10.1 installation – this is about achieving a few things

Create a completely isolated environment that I can test updates with. Even though I have access to production, test and development environments – if something goes wrong then we potentially have an expensive prospect of getting it fixed.

As it is completely isolated, I can do dumb stuff. The things that make sense in the wee hours of the morning, but once they blow up in your face you reflect and think “That was never going to work”

Provides a better understanding of how the newer versions of M3 hang together.

In this post I wanted to minimise the number of servers I needed to spin up – so the entire M3 environment is running off a single virtualised server. Needless to say, shortcuts have been taken – especially around security and some of the configuration. Likewise no consideration has been given to tuning or performance implications.

In general I’ve followed the instructions, but in some instances needed to take a bit of a leap of faith. Where I followed the manual in a section I’ve included the document I was referencing. For convenience I have also included the files that I used for installation.

Following these instructions should give you a basic running test environment, with the M3BE, M3 UI Adapter, Smart Office, LDAP Session Provider and H5 Enterprise client.

Even though the M3 environment is on a single server, I do have Active Directory and DNS set up on another server which acts as another part of my test network.

Please excuse some of the highlighting – occasionally it shoots across the screen which appears to be a bug in the beta version of Windows I’m using and it got rather tedious trying to correct all of the screen captures.

Install the M3UI Adapter

Click on Refresh and we should have the M3 UI Adapter and it should be running

Install the Enterprise Client

Note in some versions of Enterprise search, you’ll need to edit the M3_H5_Client_Enterprise/app-user so it is set to authenticated

LCM -> righ click on our grid -> Install Product

Select M3 H5 Client Enterprise and click Next

Select a path for the Mashups and click Next

Click Finish

Click OK

Click Refresh and we should see the M3 H5 Client Enterprise running

Install Mango Server

We should set Internet Explorers security to medium low before we start and add our server to IEs trusted list.

LCM -> righ click on our grid -> Install Product

Select Infor Smart Office and then click Next

Click Next

Select the server we want to install it on and click Next

Set the Default System Profile, and Suffix and click Next

Click Finish

Click OK

Refresh our LCM tree and we should see MangoServer running

Right Click on the MangoServer and select Sign Installation Point

Click Sign Installation Point

Click on Export

Save the installation point

Click Save

Go to where you extracted the InforSmartOffice_1020_LCM10.zip, go to the SignTool and unzip it

Go in to the SignTool folder and run SignTool.exe

Click Next

Browse to the location where you exported the MangoServer to

Click Next

Click Create a new self-signed certificate

Specify a name, password and location to create the cert

Click Next

Click Finish
Note the directory it’s exported to

In LCM right Click on the MangoServer and select Sign Installation Point

Click Sign Installation Point

Click on Sign Installation Point

Click on Browse

Locate the export directory

Click on Import

Click on OK

And you should see the Installation Point was imported message

Right Click on the MangoServer application and select Configure Application

Click Edit Role Mappings

Click on Edit beside Administrator

Click Add

Add users as Administrators to Smart Office (Administrator and m3srvadm)

Click OK

Click Save

Click Save

Repeat for app-admin

Install the Smart Office Client

Browse to our install location

Click Install

Log in to Smart Office with one of the users that you added to the Administrator role above

Administration Tools -> Profile Editor

Click on Advanced

Go down to M3 and enable the M3 Configuration

Scroll down to the MForms section

The Application Server can be determined by going. Right click on the M3BE and select Configure Application
Scroll down to Connection Dispatchers
So we will use 10.255.255.50:16203 (10.255.255.50 is the IP of our address)

RuntimeURLLogon can be determined by going to the default router.
Right click on the MangoServer and select Monitor Application
Click on Web Components

In the Web Routers section make note of the HTTP Port.

In IE, enter our servers IP Address and port
which will redirect you to /grid/info.html
Scroll down to the mne section
The highlighted section is our RuntimeUrlLogon and RuntimeUrl
It should look something like this:

Click Save

Click Next

Close Smart Office

Testing M3 Login

Now we should run Smart Office to test our setup. Note, in your authentication source you must have mvxsecofr set up with a username/password.

Login to Smart Office as mvxsecofr (this is one of the automatically deployed users)

We should see the menus / M3 Transactions in Navigator

We can now create other users

Install the Feature Packs

We’ve already uploaded them to LCM, now we will install them

Right click on the M3BE_15.1_TST -> Fixes -> Apply Feature Pack

We have feature pack 2 to install, so select 2, and put a tick in our regional mods (MAU), click Next

17 Responses to Installing a M3BE 15.1.2 Test Lab

We are new to M3. Though we have worked on SAP and JDA. We tried installing M3 Followed the steps as mentioned in “M3 Core Installation PlanningGuide – Windows.pdf” and “M3 Core Installation Guide -Windows.pdf” But were unsuccessful. On 2 separate installation we got 2 different errors. 1. “Application Server is not available though on webapplication page we can see all services are running and up with OK.

The other instance we got error “User profile not found.”
We did not install LDAP but using LCM configured AD LDAP and install Windows session manager.
Version used : M3-13.2 and M-13.3

If I log in to the H5 client with a user that isn’t set up within M3 (MNS150) then I get: “The application server is currently not available”

So you need to set that user up.

Initial logins on a clean new environment, you need to log in as mvxsecofr (this user needs to be set up in your authentication source). With mvxsecofr you will be able to run programs and be able to create other users.

You can see the users that are delivered by looking in the table CMNUSR

I got Independent Fisheries M3 moved to AWS under Infors Upgrade-X. So it definitely works and works well from a performance perspective.
I’ve been considering giving a Linux install a shot but I’m a little wary. The documentation can be vague and unless you have the specific flavours of the Linux OS you can quickly end up in a world of hurt.

Looking forward to your experience in updating this environment to 13.3. Please read the documentation prior that since there are numerous changes to product to be downloaded as well as the process in doing it.

Thanks for great documentation. I was able to create my test lab using steps mentioned by you.
I have some questions:
1. Is there any way to create M3 login for user whose AD ID is more than 10 characters?
2. Right now after installation i can see all options but all data is empty companies, customers etc. I can see which is due to no company present.Is there a way to get some test data loaded in M3 for practice?

1. unfortunately not as far as I am aware. The only thing that I can think of that you could do to allow staff with usernames that are longer than 10 characters is to use a different attribute from the cn in the LDAP setup. So you could use the comments field for example and have the users truncated username. This unfortunately means that your user will have a different username than that that use to log in to their computer and it means that you will need to populate this field for everyone. I am actually looking at using this technique for IFL as I transition them from their existing usernaming convention to something more consistent.
2. If you have access to Quick Step (?) then that will populate some base data, or depending on where your lab is set up you can import a copy of your companies database. As far as I am aware, Infor don’t provide a generic testing configuration – it’d be nice but…

Perhaps you should! I feel that M3 has come a long way in recent years. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t feel like the BE is stagnating. And there are some pretty kewl technologies that sit around M3 now too…

For this proof of concept, if memory serves I had about 30gig of RAM in total in my physical server. But I wouldn’t do serious testing on that.

The installation documents in InforXtreme have minimum requirements – you should use them as a guide. Also, there is no tuning or best practices applied to my install – there are guides available on InforXtreme.